TELEVISION REVIEW; Trying to Define Faith's Social Function

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Although the signs identify the series "On Values: Talking With Peggy Noonan" as a conservative enterprise, two of the first program's three guests, Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of the Jewish magazine Tikkun, and Bill Moyers, are known liberals. They are joined tomorrow night with the third guest, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, by the belief that Americans are yearning for some sort of spiritual dimension to enrich their lives and guide their society.

Disappointingly for seekers after truths that Father Neuhaus teaches can only be derived from correct religious faith, they will find no agreement here on how such a revelation would work out in practice.

Ms. Noonan, who came to prominence as a speechwriter for Presidents Reagan and Bush ("a kinder, gentler nation," etc.), agrees with Father Neuhaus that secularization is undermining American values and that faith is required to guide one on paths of righteousness. But Rabbi Lerner, whose phrase "politics of meaning" aroused the enthusiasm of Hillary Rodham Clinton, sees God's will in collective programs to help the poor, to which Ms. Noonan takes exception. No Muslim fundamentalist is on hand to give his prescription for absolute truth and its benefits.

If Ms. Noonan, a pleasant television presence with a knack for compressing issues into bites, were interested in materialistic rather than spiritual things, she would probably make it as a news-magazine interviewer. She ends her conversation with Mr. Moyers by asking him whether his recent illness changed his spiritual life. Barbara Walters couldn't have done it with a greater show of sincerity. And next week she brings on Anne Lamott, a California writer and single mother, who manages to get in half a dozen plugs for her book, "Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year," in less than 20 minutes.

Also interviewed in this three-part series about "faith, family and our freedoms" are James Q. Wilson, a professor at U.C.L.A. who is popular on the conservative circuit; Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, identified as vice president of the Institute of American Values; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the writers Shelby Steele and Stanley Crouch.

The last two, both black critics of the liberal black establishment, provide the series' zestiest moments. Speaking of what now passes in some circles as black expression, Mr. Crouch does some rapping of his own: "If those rap videos and those lyrics were written by a group of white guys who were constantly depicting young black teen-agers as sluts and hostile, murdering trivial brutes who'd shoot people for bumping into them, stepping on their feet, and do nothing but smoke fat reefers and drink 40-ounce bottles of beer and walk around looking like clowns, the civil rights organizations would have been lined up outside the studios years ago."

And Mr. Steele, though he is down on affirmative action, multiculturalism and other favorites of the political left, reminds Ms. Noonan that the 1950's, which she extols as a time when people knew right from wrong, were not all that great for America's blacks and that it was liberals, not conservatives, who led the fight for civil rights. He finds the current right-wing celebration of religious principles more convenient than convincing and makes most of Ms. Noonan's program seem programmed. ON VALUES Talking With Peggy Noonan: Faith PBS, tomorrow night at 10. (At 9 P.M. on Channel 13 in New York) Produced and directed by Michael Epstein; written by Peggy Noonan; edited by Ken Eluto and Mark Zwonitzer. Mr. Zwonitzer, associate producer. Thomas Lennon, senior producer. A Lennon Documentary Group production for WNET. For WNET: Susan Meredith Lay, producer; Harry Chancey Jr., executive producer.

Correction: February 11, 1995

A television review on Thursday about the PBS program "On Values: Talking With Peggy Noonan" described a guest on the program incorrectly. Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine, is not a rabbi.

A version of this review appears in print on February 9, 1995, on Page C00018 of the National edition with the headline: TELEVISION REVIEW; Trying to Define Faith's Social Function. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe